{"product_id":"for-the-ride-isbn-9780143134572","title":"For the Ride","description":"\u003cb\u003eA major new book-length visionary poem from a writer \"whose poems are among the major astonishments of contemporary poetry\" (Robert Polito, the Poetry Foundation)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending, book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness. Her newest book, For the Ride, is another such work. The protagonist, \"One,\" is suddenly within the glyph, whose walls project scenes One can enter, and One does so. Other beings begin to materialize, and it seems like they (and One) are all survivors of a global disaster. They board a ship to flee to another dimension; they decide what they must save on this Ark are words, and they gather together as many as are deemed fit to save. They \"sail\" and meanwhile begin to change the language they are speaking, before disembarking at an abandoned future city.\u003cb\u003e\u003cu\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eFor the Ride\u003c\/i\u003e:\u003c\/u\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“With its mess of divergent voices, picture-poems, and eccentric locutions, [\u003ci\u003eFor the Ride\u003c\/i\u003e] is baffling, beautiful, and always fascinatingly Notley . . . It’s refreshing to read poetry so dedicated to its own ends . . . as long as conformity threatens, Notley will continue to push against it, or perhaps simply beyond it. Her work warns of the ways in which our civilization and its conventional stories have failed us, but it’s also a reminder that the endless resources of language remain for those who have a little nerve.” \u003cb\u003e—David Wallace, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Alice Notley’s best work feels […] intensely recursive, almost too good to read . . . There is joy throughout the book, in Notleyish lines like ‘Stars look like the word stars, \/ really do … and sparkle is better as its word.’ I \u003ci\u003elove\u003c\/i\u003e that.” \u003cb\u003e—Elisa Gabbert, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[\u003ci\u003eFor the Ride\u003c\/i\u003e] is both challenging and rewarding, punctuating a remarkably long and quietly rebellious poetic career with an ellipsis of sorts, as it gestures to what has come before it, while also erasing or replacing it . . . [Notley's poetry] leaves the reader not with a sense of discovery but of setting out on a search which each work refuses to end . . . The fact that the book is published at this particular historical moment means it will always remind us that, at best, we are ‘not some parts’, as the global dimensions of the pandemic highlight both human interconnectedness, and the ache of separation.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Times Literary Supplement \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[\u003ci\u003eFor the Ride\u003c\/i\u003e] is a postapocalyptic adventure into an unspecified future . . . [that] quickly accelerates into a trans-dimensional and gender-defying odyssey . . . A challenging, visionary work.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e(starred review) \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Alice Notley is a disobedient medium: the dead speak through her and she speaks back. Sometimes she’s a poet of intimate address, sometimes of epic sweep. Notley’s formal experiments allow us to make contact with poetry’s originary and anarchic force.” \u003cb\u003e—Ben Lerner, National Book Award finalist and author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eNo Art\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Notley's] effort pays off brilliantly. It's easy to feel the poet reaching ecstatically for whatever tool will express the radical moment: concrete poetic images, foreign languages, colloquialisms, and unexpected humor.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Written in a breathless e.e. cummings style, the poem fractures the rules of spelling, grammar, syntax, and formal poetry . . . it also brims with fresh, vibrant metaphors and irony, not the least being the religious innuendos that permeate the text. For sophisticated readers of poetry.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eAlice Notley (1945 -2025) \u003c\/b\u003ewas born in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California. She is the author of more than forty books of poetry, including \u003ci\u003eMysteries of Small Houses \u003c\/i\u003e(Penguin, 1998, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize); \u003ci\u003eDisobedience\u003c\/i\u003e (Penguin, 2001, winner of the Griffin Prize); and \u003ci\u003eGrave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005\u003c\/i\u003e, which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her honors also include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.\u003cb\u003ePreface \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eThere is a room of walls which come alive with images and words . . . \u003cbr\u003elike a mind? in a beginning that’s first an ending—get it? You’ll have \u003cbr\u003eto decipher what’s going on, as it happens. Just like I did. I started \u003cbr\u003eout in the l’Orangerie in Paris with Monet’s Water Lilies, and their \u003cbr\u003epond, but then I, or someone, became One, on a journey to another \u003cbr\u003edimension to save Words from their demise, if there were really an \u003cbr\u003eApocalypse—I mean if there were and so all of language were lost. \u003cbr\u003e“Save the Words” is the title of chapter II. This poem goes pretty far, \u003cbr\u003eand terrifies me, but it should be read for pleasure. A story, with \u003cbr\u003echaracters, and illustrations, and qualities of humor and tender-\u003cbr\u003eness. Note further that on the ark that takes off from the pond, the \u003cbr\u003eSurvivors have with them an Anthology of poetry which is quoted \u003cbr\u003efrom: only poems can deal in the inexplicable—what really goes on. \u003cbr\u003eAnd each of the poem’s characters finally becomes poems— \u003cbr\u003enothing else left to one. I mean I don’t know exactly what happened; \u003cbr\u003eI might even have to tell this story again sometime. There are glyphs\u003cbr\u003e or paint or matter or spirit everywhere, it keeps changing before \u003cbr\u003eyour eyes or whatever one has.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e THE GLYPH OF CHAOS WITH WILLOWS\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBack up and reenter glyph again, one. Wasn't one always there?\u003cbr\u003eYes but not consciously. First capitliize the name, One. Okay,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat about beauty? Oh the glyph's beautiful, mysterious, \u003cbr\u003epossibly damning in the sense one can't go back on it, One.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne sees chaos, glyph's own background, rippled cloudy but grainy—\u003cbr\u003egradations of blue from navy to pale, shimmery, irregular...\u003cbr\u003eOne, oh One, hear tenses fall. Blanks about One of Unseen. \u003cbr\u003eOne doesn't know what's happening here! One shouts at no one. Brids fly,\u003cbr\u003earen't appearing, shadows flutter in, out of the grain, not in time—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOh but One’s not in time, what’s One in? Chaos, beautiful chaos— \u003cbr\u003eBut, too, One’s in glyph and it’s hard; learning a new way to go, \u003cbr\u003ethat is, talk? proceeding on through . . . oh this might be round, rounded. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere are transversals, blurry poles—no they are lines One can’t think \u003cbr\u003etalk correctamente ly. Mental. One can’t leave here forever? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLines hold it up, why? Collapse isn’t logical either, One. \u003cbr\u003eWho’s speaking to One? says the One. The foundational voice, One’s. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey are lines of words in some langue . . . Why can’t One read what’s within? \u003cbr\u003eOh but One can. That’s why One’s changing, having entered this star \u003cbr\u003eneither civil nor unwelcoming in its peaceful disorder; \u003cbr\u003enever proclaiming one color. One wanders letting blues fall \u003cbr\u003eembuing One, embluing one, c’est jolie in here, pas laid— \u003cbr\u003e doesn’t make one afraid of it, identityless mixages \u003cbr\u003eof the more colors now, cerise, rose, and peach, then matte dark. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOh what do the lines say to One? or to any one of the ones \u003cbr\u003esealed as ones are; senses are seals, unifying, at one’s wish, \u003cbr\u003ethe one into one like those; could see a lot more being \u003ci\u003ehere\u003c\/i\u003e? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe voice says, When one enters here, the seals come off gradually. \u003cbr\u003eFor this is one’s parent chaos, timeless, shimmering, the old. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne seems not supposed to think, in what langue? One’s head’s opaque, alive— \u003cbr\u003eopaque’s alive, is One? How does One know that One’s alive, conscious? \u003cbr\u003eStupid words, from any old language. Tints swirl in the word head; \u003cbr\u003eOne was born to be another’s creature, what is One doing here \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ein the first thought surrounded by word parts without a form, only \u003cbr\u003eripples of pigment ghosts? One likes the sudden shadow of greened black\u003cbr\u003e containing a non-rose, red fist, mouth swell. One’s former other one, \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003emate or is it silky seal, gets up naked, from a bed to show— \u003cbr\u003ein One’s imaging head—sheet of words with some replaced, edited, \u003cbr\u003emeaning ignorance censoring ignorance. Seals can’t know much . . . \u003cbr\u003enow One knows less, that’s good. Lost in glints, on the walls of the glyph— \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ewalls? Ain’t walls or a thing. Should stay or go? Can’t go to the bathroom here, \u003cbr\u003esenses have been cleaned out. Don’t have organs, aren’t in this new percept.\u003cbr\u003e Cascade of white pink strokes. Trying to read. It’s just color, o dope. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne had to go to a bed by oneself. One became one’s own seal \u003cbr\u003epast tense, isn’t it gone? Falls again, clunk. What tense is One in now? \u003cbr\u003eOne has the name of only personal pronoun here, in the tense too that’s one, \u003cbr\u003eletting it all fall to pieces of aught. One’s so sick of the seals, \u003cbr\u003etheir feelings and their deaths. Now One has died, more or less, and that’s cool?— \u003cbr\u003etree hair blaze of a naught—is it something? Now let go of One’s words— \u003cbr\u003ecopper ripples in dark. Muffle, rien? Psst, croo-oo, ping, ba bah.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Then One’s sounds in torrent. As the binging proliferates One freaks . . . \u003cbr\u003eJump up and down, timing. No one’s around; there’s no time if unwatched.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Fa-ti-gué. Think in thoughts. Oh more like clots. Lovey dovey of isles, \u003cbr\u003eOne wants to do it oneself—one makes the glyph, doesn’t one? It’s tonal \u003cbr\u003enot allegorical. Coping agent, laminate One’s rout, bout . . . \u003cbr\u003ethe coping agent’s dissolved. What if it’s hell? Just read it, stupid. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAhem. Invite extinct obscura in. Quelle porte of this here glyph?\u003cbr\u003e One used to say I and you, they and self. There was a shard-woman . . . \u003cbr\u003eGo to pieces, one fool. One are the lost. Right in the breezy loss. \u003cbr\u003eOne likes it hereabouts, no arguments, puny thoughts like blippings; \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003echirp dream of lookalikes, chimes without verb. One drops a laugh, it’s weird. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOpen mouth: squawk and then Li-sez. One wants to read some word strings. \u003cbr\u003eBut one don’t speaking right. Didn’t or can’t plafond of les nuages. \u003cbr\u003eThere was man in the store: what is a man? Goes to pieces. The door— \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eno one could find the door. Unless one’s damaged or almost dead . . . \u003cbr\u003eLeave that for just a while. It is essential to gibber, wisely— \u003cbr\u003ethis is One’s coma, like. Man sold rational parts like marks on page. \u003cbr\u003eMarks on page signify animal sounds. \u003ci\u003eThese\u003c\/i\u003e marks came before sounds . . . \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eProve it, One. Only One’s here: One makes the truth. One says what was the first:\u003cbr\u003e Nothing no verb tenses, get it? A one in a coma finds out . . . matter \u003ci\u003eis\u003c\/i\u003e marks \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ereading strings of willowlike entwinings on the blue coma walls, \u003cbr\u003ewhere the parts’ve fallen off of speech and time. Stand by the emeralds.\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eOne finds one, other one.\u003c\/i\u003e That’s one of the strands. \u003ci\u003eOne is a native one\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTell one. The twigs writhing, les branches of parts. Gaskets and piston rings; \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eone is not, ones are not, separated. But only One is here. \u003cbr\u003eOne is composed of words like one makes in beginning, chaotically. \u003cbr\u003eOne makes them? One is making them, conscious. One knows it here, not chains, \u003cbr\u003eposh garlands. Why? Why’s not valid here. Making oneself now, oh One. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne is made, already! Precisely, but is making one also—\u003cbr\u003e prior, not even born. One’s reading, therefore, what’s written by who: \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003ehad painted a lovely clasp singing in the head. The voice knows all.\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003eOne wonders if one wants structure? Later, comes after the—get rid \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eof history. It keeps the ones from coming to the quickly door. \u003cbr\u003eQuickly all’s changèd. One is another. It only took light years. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRead lines, thick intertwined. Tree trunks, what’s that? Holding up sky. No sky. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eOne now know but nothing. Starting place already contains something. \u003cbr\u003eLanguage of amoeba: In divisio, one thinks in all parts, \u003cbr\u003ethat is speaks, since the parts of one self understand each other. \u003cbr\u003eOne’s body doth know one. Holding up sky? Looking for some food. \u003cbr\u003eThere’s no food, at begins. No food in coma! Is this a coma? \u003cbr\u003eWho knows? Who knows a thing? Not a damn thing. Yer accent’s screwy.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Shimmery rose on cerulean ripples: but it’s nothing. Figment. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCreate scene. One shaking one, tells that one, You’re too shut off!—Where \u003cbr\u003edoes this come from?—Shaken one’s small, eyes wideset; has son. \u003cbr\u003eShaken one defends self wordfully, words the only weapon, \u003cbr\u003ewideset eyes too, and frailness of the canny. What is this “shut off”? \u003cbr\u003eShaking here in the glyph. Any scene can seize one, slippage of \u003cbr\u003ethe stippled frescoes, pert creation. Choose what one wish, One. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFirst One is the shaker; then the shaken: all wits and projection.\u003cbr\u003e But One wants to be One! Withhold oneself, Join not the combustion, \u003cbr\u003ethe communitarian fever to be ruled, set, open. One \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003ewants\u003c\/i\u003e to be shut off; One’s eyes aren’t wideset; One is not even formed,\u003cbr\u003e no eyes—not One. Nothing real to see yet. A one wants to shake one, \u003cbr\u003eas if somewhere in glyph thou art gone wrong, repellent but to whom. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne isn’t necessarily any of those ones, any ones at all. \u003cbr\u003eAmoeba hesitates to speak. You have to split to speak. One speaks, \u003cbr\u003eOne’s ever spoken, even in glyph. Name of language is glyphese . . . \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThus someone’s shaken One, or One shakes One; or One watches—which is\u003cbr\u003e to speak. To write? One’s body’s written in the glyph. For who to read? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor who to? Lovely tongue saying nothing. No brain in amoebese— \u003cbr\u003eoh what’s a brain, One? Only the glyph is. Speaking glyphese, glibly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e One’s been robbed of personhood; sorry, that’s what it’s like when one dies. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNew scene wall-wise, from where? The present when. Who to who? Hands them. \u003cbr\u003eHere are the parts, in black and white. They are the same as new words. \u003cbr\u003eNeutral, forward, reverse. Great shift. One speaks in the neutral tense? \u003cbr\u003eClock on the wall: is unnumbered: one doesn’t tell time here. \u003cbr\u003eFrozen wall, arched openings to back of the store, of the wall—\u003cbr\u003e it’s not a wall, it’s an image. One unwraps rounded part, obscure . . . \u003cbr\u003eone standing behind counter, hands it to parts receiver . . . \u003cbr\u003e this is what one has instead of manhood or other hood now— \u003cbr\u003edoes one really mind? not in comatose mental state, baby. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLots of wrenches there on that wall. Screwdrivers, drills, hammers— \u003cbr\u003eUS Mer. Sea’s full of the wall. Take these parts and speak newly.\u003cbr\u003e Colored pond, lilies reappear. It’s just a mind on One’s head’s\u003cbr\u003e walls. But whose? Whose mind is this? One’s? Who is One, One is asking\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e in the neutral tense; reverse won’t go. Forward, forward won’t either. No \u003cbr\u003efuture? One wants to make sense of fate. Fateless let go; wall shifting . . . \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWideset eyes defending oneself being shaken by that one still: \u003cbr\u003eOne isn’t shut off from one! Loves the one but can’t tutoyer one now. \u003cbr\u003eOne doesn’t know how to speak, in the changing glyph birth into light. \u003cbr\u003eOne has a child, is oneself. Don’t you one me, love. I’ve seen you naked . . . \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne doesn’t want to be yours, wideset eyes says to one in a blank room. \u003cbr\u003eIt’s so blank here could scream. Don’t want to be blank with the one here, \u003cbr\u003eblank as love in the world renders ones with breasts so frail and so empty.\u003cbr\u003e But \u003ci\u003eI’m\u003c\/i\u003e frail with my need, the one without breasts says hurting one . . . \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGet out of that world. One must enter the glyph of the real . . . \u003cbr\u003eDon’t you leave me! the one shouts. The one can’t if the one keeps hold like that.","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302642077925,"sku":"NP9780143134572","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780143134572.jpg?v=1767727549","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/for-the-ride-isbn-9780143134572","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}